But when I got home this evening, I looked into it a little further. Because, in a way, my keyboard can talk. As part of my personal analytics effort, I use keystroke loggers on all of my machine. (They don’t record my keystrokes, but instead keep count of how many I make.) I restarted the logger on my home machine when I got my new iMac, about 6 weeks ago or so. Since that time, I’ve logged over 400,000 keystrokes. My average typing speed is about 73 words per minute, but at times, I have clocked over 90 words per minute. If you eliminate the spacebar from the mix, my most-used key is–you guessed it: the backspace key.

Here is a heatmap of my keystrokes over the last 6 weeks. The redder a key, the more I use it:

As it turns out, the backspace key makes up 8.8% of all my keystrokes. Put another way, I hit backspace 9 times for every 100 keystrokes I make.

So I’d amend my original comment and suggest that instead of telling me to slow down, my keyboard would say, “Hey, why don’t you watch what you’re doing, bub!”